The latest installment on stilltv.com from my dear friend Peter (KuKu) Cunningham, longtime dharma bum/photographer/clown with Bernie Glassman Roshi, is of a heart/mind project with his photo students during a workshop in Shanghai last month. His one big blue ocean world is, as ever, well worth a look: http://www.stilltv.com/china/2008/seeing-seen/
My teacher wrote this verse, a quote from Nisargadatta, on my rakusu: "When I look inside and see that I am nothing, that's wisdom. When I look outside and see that I am everything, that's love. Between the two is where my life turns.''
I awoke to dark morning today. Although I see that it has now lightened to a watery gray, I do not see how or when. The advancing thick of day feels spindly, like bare trees, and yet it is full with a thousand branches. Makes me think of the structure of a Noh play, which [...]
They are all lining up, well-heeled, under umbrellas in the rain for Picasso and "the masters" here. Tickets reserved, coats checked, headsets ready. Everyone is as they should be. And the genius of 20th-century art is, too, and all the masters are, too. A parentheses of erotic drawings makes sparks, and Yo, Picasso from 1901 [...]
There was a little celebration in Paris on Monday night. Check it out at the Zen blog created by my dharma brother Man of No Rank: http://pariszen.wordpress.com/
In Venice, everywhere is land's end. Around each corner, water provides direct evidence of the absence of solid ground. Every step is bottomless. But on Monday, we awoke to a deluge in this marvel of a city. Swelled by rain and the tide, the canals and the sea had flowed into the labyrinth of narrow [...]
Nearly lunch time. Another bus passes outside the window, and a green VW Polo parks beside the linden tree. Fewer and fewer leaves are clinging to its tangle of limbs. The cat snores curled by the radiator. A colleague asks at work yesterday whether there is anything that is not conditioned. I wait, let him [...]
Another busy day: work, appointments, house chores, Métro rides, sitting group, meals... When sitting I see the revolution at hand. I see how this Zen practice is subversive. I love it! Think of the 9th-century Zen master Gensha: A monk asked him, "Where can I enter Zen?" Gensha replied, "Can you hear the babbling brook?" [...]
Peter Muryo Matthiessen Roshi, a successor of Bernie Glassman Roshi in our White Plum lineage, was awarded the prestigious National Book Award in New York last night for his novel "Shadow Country," a revision of a trilogy published in the 1990s. A marvelous honor for a marvelous writer, who, at 81, is one of the [...]
Here is Giacometti pinned on my bulletin board sculpting, his one intention being, as Yves Bonnefoy notes, "exhumer des aspects visibles l'invisible de la présence" (to exhume from the visible aspects the invisible presence) of what is before him. His drawing, painting or sculpture are his response to this experience of the "invisible presence" in [...]